Джозеф Файндер - Vanished

That was why I spent the night in the woods.

I did a loop around the Paladin compound – ten thousand acres, which meant a perimeter of close to sixteen miles. Too long to circumnavigate on foot. I took the Defender out of concealment and managed to zigzag through the woods, stopping periodically to approach the fence.

Remarkably, the entire property really was fenced in. The apparent excess confirmed what Neil Burris had told me, that Allen Granger was a man with something to worry about. Why else would he spend so much money to put up a fence sixteen miles long? I’d been to top secret government areas before, located in places that weren’t nearly so remote, and none of them was so well protected.

Allen Granger, who hadn’t been seen in public in over a year, was known to be a recluse and intensely private. I realized he was also probably paranoid.

As far as I could see, there weren’t any fiber-optic sensors buried in the ground next to the perimeter fence. That would have been outrageously costly. Unnecessary, too. Instead, the facility was protected by a twelve-foot chain-link fence, six-gauge galvanized steel – extremely difficult to cut through – and topped by coils of razor wire.

But that wasn’t all. There were guards, too. One guard was stationed at the gatehouse at the main entry and was relieved every six hours. Two others made a circuit just inside the fence. Their shift changed every six hours as well, and every half hour they radioed in to a command post.

I knew that because I listened in on their traffic using my handheld Bearcat scanner. That, and a pair of good German binoculars, were all the instruments I needed to learn what I had to about the place. There were an airstrip and several helicopter landing pads, a high-speed driving track and a running track. Rock-climbing walls and drop zones. There was a pound for bomb-sniffing dogs: I could hear the baying of the hounds late into the night. There were barracks for the trainees, a mess hall, administrative offices, and a club where the trainees could go for drinks. It closed down at two in the morning. The lawns were luxuriant and regularly irrigated and mown short like a golf course. There were a few man-made ponds. In fact, the place could have been a country club – if not for the shooting ranges and the ammo-storage bunkers. And the mock village, used for assault exercises, and a fake town with a plaque that said LITTLE BAGHDAD, even though it looked nothing like the real Baghdad and we weren’t fighting there any longer. So far as I knew, anyway. And the black Hummers that came and went at regular intervals.

Fairly close to the entrance was an impressive two-story lodge, the sort of faux-rustic home you might see in Aspen.

Granger’s house.

I paid particular attention to the patterns there. Which lights went on in which rooms and when. What time they were switched off. How many guards – two, one inside and one outside – and when their shifts ended. Allen Granger was guarded twenty-four/seven – within the well-protected confines of the compound. Like paranoid old King Herod, ruling from a fortress within the fortress city of Jerusalem, a moat and drawbridge protecting him from those he feared most of all: his own subjects.

Granger lived here alone, I was fairly certain, though I never once saw him emerge. I knew what he looked like from photographs: a clean-cut, handsome young guy, early forties. Sandy brown hair cut short, but not enlisted-man short.

The radio traffic indicated that the boss was in residence. The cook – a tiny Hispanic woman – arrived a few hours before dinnertime and went in through a separate kitchen entrance. There were meetings throughout the day. Vehicles pulled up to the front of the lodge – black Humvees for Paladin officials, and the occasional black Lincoln Town Car bearing politicians, some of whom I recognized – and were always greeted by the outside guard.

I got several hours’ sleep in the woods, in a sleeping bag in a pup tent, with enough food and water to get me through. Once I knew which room Allen Granger slept in and when his bedtime was, I put away my Leitz binoculars and my Bearcat scanner and prepared to make my move.

“You need to tell me,” Lloyd Kozak said softly, gently, “how to reach your husband.”

She couldn’t have replied even if she’d wanted to, not with the duct tape over her mouth. All she could do was shake her head and give him her fiercest glare. She couldn’t move her arms or legs.

She hadn’t expected him to be so strong, to subdue her so easily.

He had taped her into one of the dining-room chairs, her arms bound to her side, and wound silver duct tape around and around her torso. No matter how she twisted her body, she couldn’t move, couldn’t get the chair to move, and he kept talking to her in that soft, gentle voice as he unfolded a cloth parcel, the jingling of metal inside, instruments of some kind.

She grunted – angry, defiant.

The sound of a key in the lock of the front door, and she thought, Oh please, not Gabe, not now, not with this madman here.

Kozak – or whoever he was, whatever his name was – turned. “Maybe Gabriel will know how to reach his father,” he said.

She tried to scream, to warn Gabe, but nothing came out.

He had something in his hand, something shiny that glinted, caught the light from overhead. Something that looked like a blade. A razor? No. A… scalpel?

Fear wriggled deep inside her, a living organism, cold and scaly and serpentlike.

She felt the cool sharp edge of the scalpel as he placed it against the delicate skin just beneath her left eye. She closed her eyes, tried to scream again.

She couldn’t move, couldn’t shout, couldn’t warn Gabe to stay away.

Where was he?

Maybe he’d gone right up to his room.

But he must have noticed the strange car in the driveway. Or the light on in the kitchen, which would tell him that someone was home. Or the fact that the alarm tone hadn’t sounded, which would tell him that it had already been disarmed by someone, and wouldn’t he wonder why?

She heard a series of high electronic tones, faint but distinct.

Had to be Gabe, punching in the alarm code. Spacey as he always was. He was disarming the alarm even though it was already off.

Which told her that he hadn’t even noticed anything wrong. Hadn’t noticed the strange car in the driveway, or if he had, he hadn’t wondered about it.

Please don’t come in here, she thought. He’d be overpowered in a second by this lunatic.

Unless…

Unless he walked into the kitchen and saw his mother bound to a chair with a strange man there, and he turned and ran, out of the house, ran to get help. That he could do. Get help.

She didn’t even know what she wanted him to do.

But it made no difference anyway. She didn’t control her son’s actions. She could no longer keep him safe and wrap him up in his baby blanket like an egg roll. She could no longer pick him up in the palm of her hand.

She heard him go upstairs. Up to his bedroom.

Maybe that was for the best.

“Lauren,” the man murmured. She felt the prick of the blade against her eyelid, cold and hot at the same time, then warm and wet and terribly painful. “If I have to remove your eyes, I will.”

For a moment she didn’t think she could possibly have heard him right.

She squeezed her eyes tight, but it didn’t stop the pain because he just pressed the blade in harder and slid it slowly to one side and she screamed but the sound that came out was a keening, small and frightened.

“You’ll never look at your son’s face again,” he said.

“Back off,” someone said, and for an instant she didn’t recognize Gabe’s voice. It sounded deeper, as if his voice had suddenly changed.